, 1887-12-22
THE PARTISAN NEWSPAPERS.
Tho Newsboy Unknown on tho Streets c
the French Capital.

inc NeWsDOy unknown on tho streets OF
the French Capital.
One of the most characteristic street
cries of London and of New York is never
heard in Paris, nor is one of the most
picturesque figures in the streets of Lon
don and of New York ever seen in the
streets of Paris, for in France the noisy
and pertinacious newsboy is unknown.
The functions of this unstable dissemi-
nator of intelligence are filled in Paris by
the staid old dame who sits at the receipt
of custom in a kiosque. A Partisan kiosque
has nothing oriental but the name. 1t is
a little sentry box of glass, Just large
enough to shelter the news vender from
the changeable weather of the French
capital. On a little stand in front of the
kiosque are tiny heaps of the countless
newspapers of the city, and on strings on
each side are pendant numbers of The
chief illustrated journals, artistic and
comic. These kiosques are scattered
along the ~boulevards, and from them the
Partisan buys his Figaro in the morning
and his Temps at 8 in the afternoon.
This difference of attitude between the
hurrying American, who has to have his
newspaper brought to him in haste hot
from the press, and the l~eisurely French
man, who is content to pick up his paper
when he goes abroad this difference is
far more than external; it is essentially
typical of the irreCOncilable difference be-
tween the French journal and the English
or American newspaper. For one thing,
the French journal is not a newspaper in
the American sense of the woodland of
a truth it does not pretend or desire to be.
The Figaro now and again makes n
ludicrous claim TO the ubiquitous
Omniscience of The London Times or The
New York Herald, but this is not to be
taken seriously. The fact is, that while
the primary quality of a good English or
American paper is news, the primary
quality of a good French paper is not
news, but criticism-criticism of politics
in the first place, of course, and, in the
second, criticism of commerce, of law, of
finance, of science, of art, of literature,
and of the drama.
The aim and ideal of the best French
editors is to present not so much the
minor details of n fact, but the best posi-
BILE opinion on the fact. OF mere brute
news, minute particulars of scandals,
crimes m horrors, such as we here in
America have dumped upon our break
fast table every morning, with all the aC-
companying repetition and accumulation
of uninteresting fact-of all this the reader
of the Partisan journal sees little or moth
ing. The childish or unintelligent thirst
to know what has happened, regardless of
the importance of the event, has not yet
been developed in france by the rivalry
of scrambling editors; and it may be as
serted without fear of contradiction that
even if they could have it without cost
and without trouble, French editors would
refuse to print most of the trivial trash
which cumbers the columns of even the
foremost American papers.
1t is not that some Partisan papers do
not print trivial trash and trash worse
than trivial; the difference is rather in
aim, the French editor thinking first of
criticism and the American editor only
too often thinking of mere news-irst,
last and all The time. Yet the leading
principle which should govern even in
news gathering is better understood in
Paris thai in London or New York. This
is the principle which has been aptly called
the perspective of news" and by virtue
of which a trifing accident in the imme-
date neighborhood is of more importance
than a great calamity 1000 miles away.
As Villemessant concisely put it, "a dog
run over on the Boulevard DIES I~taliens is
of more consequence to The Figaro than
an earthquake in Australia. If we sub
stitatsfo the injured dog n picture OK
hibited or n new play produced, we have
Just the things about which the Partisan
papers give the most news.-Brander
Matthews in The Century.